Cookie Classification - Standard Response

Hi (name),
 

Thanks for your note.
 

On the subject of cookie classification, the advice that we’ve been given is that live chat cookies can be considered essential and therefore exist without the opt-in that would be required for say functional cookies.

The vast majority of our customers take this view and as a result their chat cookies don't require opt-in.

[ The crux of the matter seems to come down to whether or not one of the core purposes of the website in question is to provide prospective customers with a means to get in touch with the business; a determination best made by the business itself. ]
 

If you do decide to tag chat cookies as only ‘Functional’, you'll experience a decline in customer engagement and chat/lead volumes, with a large cohort of visitors unable to enquire via chat.

In that instance, you could achieve at least some degree of mitigation by framing the cookie opt-in question that pop’s up as being between ‘All Cookies’ or ‘Manage Settings’. Irrespective of how chat cookies are labelled, this is actually something many of our customer have implemented as a hygiene factor (as shown in the example below).

The added benefit of this of course is that the vast majority of users will opt-in (where they typically opt-out if presented with a ‘no-cookies’ option on the first stage of the pop-up), meaning you can deliver them a better on-site experience through the use of functional cookies and utilise any marketing tools that add value.

I do hope this helps. Of course how you tag the cookies is very much at your discretion, but as I say, we’ve been advised that for most of our customers chat cookies would be considered essential.

Best,